


Dichotomy

by ThisMessIsAPlace (DJFero)



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Gen, Mention of the outsiders childhood, Mostly a bunch of vague cryptic bullshit and metaphors, Not shippy but read into it what you will, Prompted Work, The Outsider character study
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-27
Updated: 2017-01-27
Packaged: 2018-09-20 06:28:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,408
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9479402
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DJFero/pseuds/ThisMessIsAPlace
Summary: A wild thought comes, somewhere between the first touch of metal and the final bite of pain.The thought is: In this moment I have never been more important.The thought is: In this moment I have never been less a person.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I asked for drabble prompts on [Tumblr](http://atomicreactor.tumblr.com), to shake off some rust with a character study of The Outsider. My friend Joe suggested:
> 
> "Something about how he makes connections between the people he marks and his life before the Void"
> 
> I fucked up a perfectly good drabble prompt, is what I did.
> 
> Look at it. It's got motifs.

If he’s had one name he’s had a thousand, in a tongue that will die when the city does.

They are not names but descriptions of his form and assessments of his worth, lobbed at him in the street; they are words that mean “boy” and “ugly” and “offal” and “useless.” But if ever there was someone who gave him a name that meant _him_ he does not remember, and no one else cares to.

He responds to all the other titles he is given because that is all he can do. In the main, he responds by ducking his head and scurrying away towards safety.

Sometimes he is successful. Sometimes he is not.

Sometimes he is called sweet things, and he knows then to scurry faster.

He is aware very young that there is always an imbalance of power, and that those who have less are named Dirt by those who have more. He becomes familiar with that dynamic, and with being one with Dirt.

It’s a lesson that sticks in his broken bones.

 

* * *

 

It’s difficult to see someone’s eyes in a place this dim and a hood that deep, and that is not even to mention the heroic effort it takes to look past the wrong end of a knife. But he looks and he _sees_.

A wild thought comes, somewhere between the first touch of metal and the final bite of pain. It comes like a tsunami; it comes like a great wave that towers, serene, on the horizon and seems to draw upon him slow. Its impact is catastrophic when it crashes ashore.

The thought is: In this moment I have never been more important.

The thought is: In this moment I have never been less a person.

He is the salvation they have awaited, and he is beloved for it – but he is only a vessel, the sum of his blood and bones. For one instant, on the scale of Powerful and Not, he is bound upon the fulcrum.

And then that instant stretches on, and on, and on; he remains at the center of gravity and the balance never tips.

 

* * *

 

The Outsider wonders if he has transcended the boy called Boy, or hasn’t he.

Centuries on he knows fundamentally that he is not Dirt anymore (sometimes they ask, and he tells them he is _older than_ , and no one stops to consider that maybe he is not serious).

He is all potential and non-kinetic. He has vast power (but not infinite) and little agency (but not none). The knife did not deliver him from _strong_ to _weak_ , from _powerless_ to _powerful_ , from _have not_ to _have_. It cut a clear divide between, and let him slip through to linger in limbo, unending.

But he is still, in the ways that matter, himself. And so even divorced from the cycle it consumes his thoughts.

The first time he gives his Mark away, to a man who has only known dust and blood and craves more, it sinks the city of his birth into the sea. He is not certain whether he mourns it or not. He is not certain if he chose well or not.

He is certain that the experience was informative, and that it was also disappointing.

 

* * *

 

Vera stands at an intersection of dangerous and safe.

She would gnash teeth against bone and shred flesh like lace beneath her claws. She is a feral thing born by accident into domesticity. She keeps pearls out of habit, but she rejects power in the end, and that at least keeps his eye on her for a while.

She loves him sometimes and he wonders. She marries herself to him, her Black Eyed Groom, even absent of his assent. Even to him it is unclear if it is romance she is after, or if she wants to chase something greater than herself and see where she ends up when her quarry is lost or caught.

Perhaps it is the chase, and perhaps that is what drives her mad.

But there is a tenderness he does not think he craves, exactly, but knows he does not abhor, and with all the _means_ he gives her she is happiest when she _ends_ down among the filth.

He lets her keep him a while longer, if only at arm’s length.

 

* * *

 

There are ruthless generals reviled by history – called madmen and murderers, remembered only for the scars they leave in the earth – who within their tents and forts were fathers to their soldiers. When added together over centuries and millennia, they are a coin a dozen. Loving _us_ while killing _them_ is not enough to make them complex. It is not enough to make them unique.

So Daud with his Whalers is not unique. But that does not mean he is not interesting.

Daud considers himself little more than a knife, because it keeps his conscience at bay and lets him pretend he’s killed it. But when futures flash red before his black eyes The Outsider thinks that Daud is more of a wrench in want of gears, so he gives him the run of them.

In the end he supposes he was neither right nor wrong.

Daud gums up the works, but when the Outsider looks upon him he is reminded primarily of a knife, and of the hooded man behind it.

The tragedy of it is that that is not enough to make him unique either. Not by a long shot.

But it is enough to make the Outsider leave.

 

* * *

 

He has not been Boy or Dirt since before his city fell and for thousands of years after. But neither have left him. He is still himself, and the urge to scurry remains, even when it is only a potential without a _to_ or even a _from_ to tip it toward kinetic.

He has not looked at a blade from the wrong end since before these islands had names, but it still cuts through his thoughts. It cuts sharper still when he gives his Mark to someone who is only Dirt, and watches their eyes turn everyone before them into only a vessel.

Again, and again, and again.

He has been divorced from the cycle of Powerful and Not, but he watches it repeat like a play of his own life, and he wonders if anyone will ever become as exhausted of it as he is. As fascinated by it as he is.

 

* * *

 

Corvo started low and rose high enough to feel the impact of his fall in every bone. That is not unique.

He turned himself into a knife years ago, but with blade pointed up to block and defend, and being a knife has never replaced being a man. And that is rare, but it is not unique either.

He is not given to agency. He is given to obedience, like an instinct. And when the Loyalists take the place of the Empress who guided his blade, a blade is all they want him to be.

The Outsider watches, and wonders when he will obey that, too. It is not a question of _if_. He will tire of being Dirt, and want instead to put his heel to it and grind it down, and The Outsider gives him the leverage to push himself up there. Now he only wonders _when_.

But it is not at the Abbey, and it is not at the Tower. The Flooded District, then, seems the perfect stage for a foregone conclusion.

Corvo looks up at the wrong end of Daud’s blade. But when he walks out of the sewers, he is still more man than knife. He is himself. And that is unique.

He has power enough now, since he left his cell behind, to throw his weight from one side of the scale to the other and crash it down. But he only ever seeks the balancing point at the center where he can stand on steady ground. And that is unique.

Each moment that he breathes, he holds a knife, because he can no longer breathe quite right without the weight of it. But no one falls beneath it into the empty arithmetic of blood and bone, the vessels of his revenge. And that is unique.

He bears no resemblance at all to the man the Outsider expected. He bears no resemblance to the men the Outsider remembers.

And that is enough to make the Outsider linger.


End file.
